Today
by Syal
Summary: You'd like to believe that the joy of love is worth the pain. JackXStephen.


Today

-----The day Jack told you he was going off to sea was the first time he spent the night with you instead of his wife.  
  
"When?" you asked, and he rolled over on his side, brushing the hair back from his eyes.  
  
"A month. A fortnight. I'm not entirely sure." He pulled you into his arms and you let him; what else could you do. "You are to come with me," he told you quietly but not carefully, measuring your reaction with his fingertips.  
  
You were so happy that you forgot all about your research and your patients, and only focused on the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled.-----The day you wished you'd never come was the first time Jack ever really yelled at you.  
  
Three weeks swaying in the emotionally unstable waters of the Atlantic, and only one life had been lost. "It was all I could do," you told him, taking off your glasses and pinching the bridge of your nose between your fingers. "If you had brought him in sooner—"  
  
But Jack interrupted you with a rough heat in his voice that burned worse than fire. "No. No! _You're_ the doctor," he reminded you sharply. "You weren't good enough."  
  
You couldn't hear him after awhile, the roar in your ears too loud and the throbbing too persistent. At first you thought it was just the waves, but then you realized that it was really your own heart beating, rush of cold blood resonating in your head.  
  
That night you laid awake in bed and cried tears of pain and regret, and when you finally fell asleep, you had dreams the color of the cold in his eyes when he slammed the door in your face.-----The day you first set foot on land since you left Britain was the first time you told him you loved him.  
  
The Galapagos were beautiful; more beautiful than the pure black of the ocean at night, more beautiful than Haydn's cello concerto in the haunting quiet of your chambers, and almost as beautiful as you imagined Jack to be when he gave the command to abort the mission.  
  
"It was nothing," he told you when you smiled up at him from your cot, for once not wincing at the phantom bullet in your side. He looked away and made excuses that were too obvious to be believed, but you pretended that they weren't for the sake of his pride. And when he closed his eyes and kissed you, you almost forgot the self-doubt in the pit of your stomach when you said those three fragile words that nobody wants to be a lie.-----The day you learned to stop crying was the first time you really understood death.  
  
Jack was silent when you came to his room that night, sitting perfectly still at his desk and staring at you with hollow eyes. You watched him and you thought to yourself, why is the body of a young man trapped underneath a cannon ball at the bottom of the ocean so much more important than the thousands of Frenchmen you'll never know.  
  
You realized then that death is final and that everyone leaves the same way, in the end. You learned that people are hypocrites and will mourn whom they were raised to mourn.  
  
Jack told you to go away, but you didn't leave until his inkwell shattered violently above your left shoulder, staining the wall an indigo so deep it trickled black. "Goodnight," you told him bitterly, though you didn't think he heard you.  
  
When you got back to your room you sat down in your chair and thought about how completely unfair it was that people mattered more in death than in life, and you squinted into your hand mirror and tried to turn your eyes to glass.-----Today is the day that you attack the _Acheron_, and it's the first time you've ever really been afraid.  
  
You were nervous when the ship almost when under, and you were delirious when you had to remove a bullet from your own abdomen, but you've never known the powerlessness of fear until you think of Jack with his side impaled on the indifferent blade of a bayonet.  
  
And it's then that you realize that you love him, _really_ love him. Maybe it's an unhealthy love; in fact, it's probably an unhealthy love, a masochistic tendency. A twisted, malignant feeling buried deep inside yourself that makes you cry at the way he hurts you and alive at the way he loves you. It's a love that you're not sure if you should try to preserve because he might not even love you back, not the way you want him to, and maybe not at all, but you can't stop. You can't stop and you don't think you want to.  
  
Jack Aubrey is both the cause and cure for your suffering, and that scares you almost as much as not really knowing what you mean to him.  
  
But what scares you the most, more than anything that lives or breathes or dies or doesn't, is imagining that he won't come back, and knowing that you'd never be able to search his eyes for the answer again. 


End file.
